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PAST FOUR YEARS 




An Address delivered Thursday, April 29, 1920, before 
Thomas Johnson Chapter, Daughters of American Revolution 

CHARLES J.'^BONAPARTE 



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Ladies, 

Four years have passed since I spoke to you of the very seri- 
ous dangers which might threaten our Country, and especially 
our own State, if our rulers should persist in an obstinate re- 
fusal to prepare for war, while yet war was only probable, and 
before it became certain. Whatever may have been the other 
lessons of these four years, certainly they have not shown me 
mistaken in the views I then expressed. This fact is, in itself, 
neither important nor interesting to anyone but myself; en- 
couraged by it, I feel justified, however, in devoting a large part 
of my trespass on your indulgence this afternoon to pointing 
out, in as few words as possible, two of the lessons which those 
willing to be taught by experience may learn from American 
history since April,. 1916. 

In the first place, we have had another illusti^ation, and a 
very striking one, of the significant and well-established fact 
that in our case at least, the most effective safeguard of peace 
is thorough preparedness, both material and moral, for war. 
It may be a mere co-incidence, but it may also be something 
more, and, in any event, it is certainly true, that we have never 
had a war with a civilized enemy while our President was a 
soldier. Under Washington and Jackson and Taylor and Grant 
our Country enjoyed all the blessings of peace at home and 
abroad; under John Adams, we had hostilities with France; 
under Thomas Jefferson, we had war with Tripoli ; under James 
Madison, we had war with Great Britain. James K. Polk was 
our President when we drifted into war with Mexico ; William 
McKinley, when we drifted into war with Spain ; James 
Buchanan when we drifted into our own Civil War, Woodrow 
Wilson when we had war forced upon us three years ago. And 
not only were all these belligerent Presidents civilians, with the 
single exception of President McKinley, who, in his youth, had 
served with credit in the Civil War, every one of them was em- 
phatically a man of peace; not one could rank with Fuzzy 
Wuzzy as "a first-class fightin' man"; or justly claim to be a 
fighting man of any class or quality. In 1917, we had another 
proof, another added to many already furnished us by our his- 
tory as a nation, that it is not fighting men who get us into war, 
but men who try so hard and wish so earnestly to avoid fight- 
ing that they lead those disposed to trample on our rights to 
believe this may be done with impunity. 



Let me pause here for a moment to remind you how and why 
we went into the great World War three years ago ; for, on this 
subject, a very curious and wholly groundless fiction has been 
rather widely propagated. We went to war because, and only 
because, the German Empire insisted, despite every remons- 
trance and every warning, on sinking our merchant ships and 
drowning or exposing to great danger of death American citi- 
zens, Avho were not only neutrals, but non-combatants, some of 
them women and children. In other words, we went to war 
with Germany simply because Germany made war on us. 
Doubtless the Kaiser and his advisers didn't wish us to look at 
Germany's action in that light, William II may know enough 
of old English literature to remember the lines : 

That is no war, each mortal knows, 
Where one side only deals the blows. 

And he would have liked us to allow the kind of "peace" thus 
delineated to continue indefinitely between us and himself. But 
when our ships were sunk by his submarines and our citizens 
killed or left to perish on the ocean, the common sense of the 
American people saw that this condition of things could be no 
more made peace by calling it "peace," than a dog's tail could 
be made a leg by calling it such ; and American public opinion 
forced American politicians to accept the fact that we were 
at war. On this point, there is no more room for doubt or dis- 
pute than there is as to the death of Julius Caesar or the ex- 
istence of George Washington. On April 2nd, 1916, President 
Wilson, addressing both Houses of Congress, said : 

"I advise that the Congress declare the recent course 
of the Imperial German Government to be in fact noth- 
ing less than war against the Government of the United 
States; that it formally accept the status of belliger- 
ent which has thus been thrust upon it ; and that it take 
immediate steps not only to put the country in a more 
thorough state of defense, but also to exert all its 
powers and employ all its resources to bring the Gov- 
ernment of the German Empire to terms and end the 
war." 

In accordance with the President's advice, a resolution declar- 
ing war against Germany was immediately introduced into 
both Houses and, after a very bitter debate, was adopted, in the 
Senate, by a vote of 82 to 6 ; in the House, by a vote of 373 to 50. 
As finally adopted, it read : 



"Whereas the Imperial German Government has 
repeatedly committeed acts of war against the Govern- 
ment and the people of the United States of America : 
Therefore be it Kesolved by the (Senate and the House 
of Representatives of the United States of America in 
Congress assembled, that the state of war between the 
United States and the Imperial German Government 
which has thus been thrust upon the United States is 
hereby formally declared; and the President be, and 
he is hereby, authorized and directed to employ the 
entire naval and military forces of the United States 
and the resources of the Government to carry on war 
against the Imperial German Government; and to 
bring the conflict to a successful termination all of the 
resources of the country are hereby pledged by the 
Congress of the United States." 

There was nothing obscure or equivocal in this language : obvi- 
ously Congress said what it meant and meant what it said. We 
went to war simply as a matter of self-defense, to protect our- 
selves from unjustifiable and intolerable aggression. This was, 
on our part, a just and wise and creditable course, and involved 
no assertion by us, as a nation, of novel and compromising doc- 
trines or visionary and perilous aims. We were emphatically 
''minding our own business," for the first business of every gov- 
ernment is to protect its subjects from violence and wrong. 

Nevertheless it has been obstinately, not to say impudently, 
alleged, publicly and again and again, and it is really believed 
by some well-meaning persons, that the United States declared 
war against Germany to assure practical acceptance of what 
are known as President's Wilson's "Fourteen Points," and espe- 
cially of the Fourteenth among these "Points," which reads as 
follows : 

"A general association of nations must be formed 
under specific covenants for the purpose of afi'ording 
mutual guarantees of political independence and terri- 
torial integrity to great and small states alike." 

These "Points" formed part of an address delivered by the 
President to the two Houses of Congress on January 8th, 1918, 
nine months and two days after our declaration of war, in 
which address the President gave his views, not at all as to the 
causes of the war, but as to what might be desirable conditions 
of peace. They are entitled to such measure of weight and re- 
spect as may seem appropriate, in view of their authorship, but 



they were never adopted by any authority qualified to speak for 
the people of the United States, or to bind us, either legally 
or morally, to national action. 

The last statements may need a few words of qualification or, 
at least, of explanation. In a speech on the War with Mexico, 
delivered in the Senate of the United States on January 26th, 
1848, Hon. John A. Dix, then a Senator from New York, said : 

" The declarations of a President, having no power 
to make war without a vote of Congress, or even to 
employ the military force of the country except to 
defend our own territory, is very different from the 
protest of a sovereign holding the issues of peace and 
war in his own hands. But the former may not be less 
effectual when they are sustained . . . . by an 
undivided public opinion, even though they may not 
have received a formal response from Congress." 

If, therefore, President Wilson's "declaration" of policy em- 
bodied in ''Point XIV" was "sustained by an undivided public 
opinion," it might be reasonably deemed, in some measure, 
morally binding on the Country, although it had never re- 
ceived what General Dix called "a formal response from Con- 
gress." This was evidently the view of President Wilson him- 
self, for on October 25th, 1918, ten days before the Congres- 
sional election of that year, he issued an appeal to the voters to 
elect only candidates of his own party. In this appeal, he said : 

"If you have approved of my leadership and wish 
me to continue to be your unembarrassed spokesman 
in affairs at home and abroad, I earnestly beg that you 
will express yourselves unmistakably to that effect by 
returning a Democratic majority to both the Senate 
and the House of Representatives. 

I am your servant and will accept your judgment 
without cavil, but my power to administer the great 
trust assigned to me by the Constitution would be 
seriously impaired should your judgment be adverse, 
and I must frankly tell you so, because so many critical 
issues depend upon your verdict * * * If in these 
critical days it is your wish to sustain me with un- 
divided minds, I beg that you will say so in a way 
which it will not be possible to misunderstand either 
here at home or among our associates on the other 
side of the sea. I submit my difficulties and my hopes 
to you." 



This request for a vote of confldeuce had especial reference to 
tlie prespective negotiations for peace; for the president de- 
clared : 

"The leaders of the minority in the present Congress 
have unquestionably been pro-war, but they have been 
anti-administration." 
Adding : 

'This is no time either for divided council or divided 
leadership. Unity of command is as necessary now in 
civil action as it is upon the field of battle .... 
The return of a Republican majority to either House 
of Congress would, moreover, be interpretative on the 
other side of the water as a repudiation of my leader- 
ship." 

I am not concerned with the merits of these views : they may 
be held by admirers or critics of the President (as they were 
held by his admirers or critics at the time) to be worthy or 
unworthy, wise or unwise, politic or impolitic; I quote them 
only to show on what great issue the voters passed in Novem- 
ber, 1918, and I claim with confidence that this issue was in- 
contestably the acceptance or rejection of the President's peace 
policy, so far as it had been then disclosed to the public, includ- 
ing the well-known "Fourteen Points," and especially the par- 
ticularly well-known "Point XIV." 

At the date of the election, there was a Democratic majority 
of 10 in the Senate and a Democratic majority of 5 in the 
House of Representatives : as results of the election, these were 
changed into a Republican majority of 2 in the Senate and a 
Republican majority of 45 in the House. 

The President had said that "the return of a Republican ma- 
jority to either House of Congress" might admit of interpreta- 
tion "on the other side of the water as a repudiation of his 
leadership": without necessarily accepting "this statement as 
literally accurate, one can hardly question that the return of 
pueh majorities to both Houses of Congress, did 7iot show that 
the "Fourteen Points," and especially that "Point XIV," had 
the support of that "undivided public opinion," which General 
Dix said would be needed to make a President's declarations 
morally binding on the Country, in the absence of "a formal 
response from Congress." 

To my mind, the second noteworthy lesson of the past four 
years is that the rulers of a great nation, like all other men 
in all other stations and callings, if they would escape disaster, 



must be guided in their policies, not by vain dreams, not by 
emptj' visions, conjured up througli wilful self-deception, but by 
the truth. Had William of Hohenzollern seen things as they were, 
and acted on what he thus saw, he would be today the powerful 
and prosperous Emperor of a powerful and prosperous empire. 
Had Nicholas of Russia and Francis Joseph of Austria seen 
things as they were, and practically accepted what they knew 
in their hearts to be facts, Austria would be still a nation and 
Russia would not be a witches' cauldron of abominations and 
horrors. Had Great Britain heeded the wise counsel of Lord 
Roberts, had France always turned a perfectly deaf ear to the 
pernicious advice of her Pacifists, had Belgian politicians lost 
less time in giving their country universal military service, hun- 
dreds of thousands of lives had been spared and myriads of 
homes had escaped desolation. Finally, had our own govern- 
ment commenced to place the nation in a state of defense in the 
Summer of 1914, instead of in the Spring of 1917, and it was 
sheer wilful blindness which prevented this, we should have 
saved at least half of our present national debt, preserved for 
useful and happy lives many thousands of our best young men 
and spared mankind perhaps two years of the war's agony. 

We have recently heard through the newspapers of certain 
astronomers, or scientists of some sort, who shut themselves 
up in a farm house on the Western prairies, with a wireless ap- 
paratus of immense power to get a message from Mars, which 
message, unfortunately, wasn't forthcoming. Inasmuch as we 
do not know whether Mars is or is not inhabited by living 
beings, nor, if it is, whether these beings, or any of them, have 
a language, nor yet, if they have, what that language is, nor, 
if the said language exists, whether anybody on this earth could 
understand it, nor, finally, that the hypothetical Martians, if 
there be any, have any reason or wish to send us a message, the 
undertaking of the scientists did not appear to me very prom- 
ising; to my mind, it bore a great resemblance to looking in a 
dark cellar at midnight without a light for a black cat which 
isn't there: nevertheless, there was nothing absolutely irra- 
tional or absurd in it; it was giving time and trouble and in- 
curring expense with very, very little chance of return, but not 
in the face of a positive certainty that there could be no return 
at all. But for our statesmen to base the Nation's foreign policy 
on the assumptions that war has become abhorrent to human 
nature and that peace can and will be made perpetual by a 
treaty declaring it such, and to do this immediately after the 
World's experience in the past six years, seems to me, to speak 
plainly, conduct demanding treatment at the Phipps or the 



Shepherd. It might be appropriate in that planet, conjectured 
to exist by John Stewart Mill, where two and two make five; 
but, on this Earth, it can be sincerely approved only by those 
bereft of reason. 

And yet this is precisely what many writers and speakers, 
clergymen and college professors, politicians and office-holders 
and newspaper men are trying to make the people believe and 
pretending, or, at least, professing, to believe themselves. These 
people are, in part, the survivors, or successors and pupils, of 
our pre-war "Pacifists," that noisy crowd of men and women, 
all the more mischievous because many of them had been esti- 
mable and useful in religious, educational, humanitarian or 
charitable work, who, in 1915 and 1916 and the early months 
of 1917, excitedly urged the adoption of a national policy of 
voluntary impotency and, in some cases, actually lauded pol- 
troonery as a virtue in our young men. In itself, this was not 
perhaps a matter of any great moment. The Pacifist agitation, 
especially after its reductio ad ahsurdum in Mr. Henry Ford's 
Peace Ship, called, with some reason, "the one grim joke of the 
war," proved utterly futile and trivial as soon as the national 
sense of duty and national instinct of self-preservation were 
fairly awakened; but the heedlessness of a free people, where 
each man's thoughts are too often absorbed by his own needs 
and interests, gave this agitation a factitious consequence for 
politicians, and some of the latter undoubtedly believed this 
small but noisy and self-assertive element really voiced the 
wishes and the sentiments of the people. Moreover another de- 
plorable result folloAved from this strange display of unreason. 
For a time, we were in danger of losing the respect of man- 
kind. "Sir," said William B. Giles, of Virginia, in debate in 
the Senate on February 8th, 1809, "When love of peace de- 
generates into fear of war, it becomes of all passions the most 
despicable" : in saying this, he voiced the judgment of all men 
in all ages. And this was not merely a disgrace to our country 
and ourselves; it gravely increased our peril, for it is even more 
clearly true of a nation than of a man that, in the words of 
Thomas Jefferson : "A coward is much more exposed to quarrels 
than a man of spirit." Germany might not have adopted or per- 
sisted in her policy of submarine aggression on our merchant 
ships and thus forced us into the v.ar, had her rulers felt less 
contempt for a nation whose sentiments were voiced, in their 
judgment, by a little gToui3 of men and women fondly believing 
they had "abolished war," and, who, like the astronomer walk- 
ing into the v/ell, were too much engrossed by fancied beauties 



of a world of their imagination to heed or deal with the evils 
and dangers of our world of fact. 

We have been taught likewise, and taught by a costly experi- 
ence, that talk, however eloquent, ingenious and edifying and 
diplomatic correspondence, however subtly conceived and forci- 
bly expressed, can no more take the place or do the work of 
armies and fleets than a stone can do duty for bread. Jonathan 
Russell, then our Charge d' Affaires in London, wrote on May 
9th, 1812, to James Monroe, who was Secretary of State : 

''We have a reputation in Europe for saying so much 
and doing so little that we shall not be believed in 
earnest until we act in a manner not to be mistaken." 

When I addressed you in 1916, our real reputation in Europe, 
the reputation disclosed by private correspondence and in daily 
frank intercourse with all sorts of people abroad, did not differ 
very widely from what it was a hundred and three years before. 
To "be believed in earnest," as Russell said, in other words, to 
have attention paid when we spoke and respect either felt or 
shown for our sentiments and wishes, we had to show, again 
quoting Russell, "in a manner not to be mistaken," that, at all 
events, we were prepared to meet and repel unprovoked aggres- 
sion. 

We Americans then sincerely loved peace, but many for- 
eigners who judged us, not altogether unreasonably, by what 
some more or less prominent Americans said and did, believed 
our professed love of peace to be only a cloak for fear of war, 
and, believing this, they thought of us in accordance with the 
above quoted words of Senator Giles. To have them respect 
us we had to show them, and the whole world with them, by our 
acts, that when, unhappily, war was forced upon us, we were 
not afraid of war. 



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